Jonathan did not yet trust himself enough, or Sarah, to make his way to a decision. Anna was gone, back to London, to mind the house of an old friend unexpectedly posted to Geneva for a year. Gordie paid one lot of school fees and Jonathan paid the next; an unknown young man called Gaspar was now the beneficiary of school fees paid by a man in Australia he would never meet. Anna was gone; a hardy sort of migratory bird, used to storms and hot deserts, and he felt sure she would find another spot to roost.
His daughters—both of them!—were badgering him to take Sarah back. How often does anyone get a second chance in life? It was their dream come true, it was his dream come true, a Hollywood ending. Yet, somehow, Jonathan was still wandering around the back lots, anguished, gathering his courage. He had been so hurt, so wounded, he did not know if he had it in him to forgive her. Did he want love’s vastness back, with all its capacity for damage? One day he will decide, and his human moment—misjudged or correct—will join all the other moments in the fabric of existence, everything that did not happen, and everything that did. He will never know who Celia and Glen Quinn ran into at Lake Como, adding one more thing to the list of infinite things about the infinite world he will never understand, or know.
And Scarlett—no longer pregnant—will fit into her wedding dress when she marries Paul—with his fresh vasectomy scar—before flying off to Dubai, to travel in a four-wheel-drive convoy with her husband and their two babies into the desert, into the northern tip of the great continent of Africa, into the domesticated new world, where the names of shops on every high street of every first world city are interchangeable—Starbucks, Bang & Olufsen, Hermès. Homeless, at last!
And Giselle will grow up to finish high school, because of an exceptional teacher called Mr Leung, who noticed her. And she will eventually go on to become a schoolteacher herself, diverting the course of human lives as her own life had been caught, diverted.
And Penny will pick up her paintbrush in an ecstasy of release—painting the children who have vanished with their parents into the vastness of elsewhere. Here, with her mother in the next room—and possibly, just possibly—living in a new flat under the house, she will try to make whatever she is making, imperfectly and full of mistakes. She will take long-service leave; not certain what she is going to do with what remains of her life, but certain she is making something manifest, exploiting to the best of her abilities—or the worst!—her raw materials. She is herself, no-one finer. She might travel, or she might not; her project might come to something, or it might not, but, suddenly, she will be free of caring. She will see how far she can take a line for a walk.
But Penny will never be prepared for her mother and Gordie announcing one bright summer morning that they are getting married.
‘Mum!’ she will cry.
The light is fading, the waters rising, the scales waiting, mystically balanced between suffering and the radiance of love. For a dazzling instant, Marie and Gordie and Penny are alive in light’s brightness. Ring the bells, raise the glass, for—right now—Marie is laughing, holding Gordie’s hand, filled with nothing but the light of life and the astonishing words, We’re getting married. I’m afraid we’re in love.